My Life as a Quant Read Online Free PDF

programs in the United Kingdom and the United States. The Cape Town physics department was insularly lukewarm about the benefits of study abroad, but I did not let them dissuade me.
    If not for the acne, I might have remained in South Africa. Ever since, I’ve liked to believe that the course of my life, the old friends I parted from and the new friends I made, my marriage and my children, were the consequence of a random case of acne. 1
    Particle physics is the study of the smallest and most fundamental constituents of matter. Even in Cape Town, 5,000 miles from Europe and civilization, we knew that we were in the glory days of the field. As the 1960s passed, each year brought yet another triumph. At accelerators around the world, experimentalists clashed ultrahigh-speed protons against each other like cymbals and discovered a multiplicity of new particles emerging from the collision. Richard P. Feynman once said that doing elementary particle physics is a lot like banging two fine Swiss watches against each other and trying to figure out their workings by examining the debris. That was the challenge.
    The proliferation of new particles made it difficult to know which were elementary and which were compound. The mystery was a recapitulation of the great puzzle of nineteenth-century chemistry, when the similar proliferation of new substances provoked the quest to understand chemical structure. That pursuit had culminated in Mendeleyev’s construction of the periodic table, which arranged all the elements in an understandable order based on their chemical qualities. Empty spots in the table corresponded to as-yet-undiscovered elements whose qualities, associated with their place in the table, suggested how to find them. Now, in the twentieth century, the race was on to find an analogous table for the qualities of so-called elementary particles. So many new ones were being discovered in cosmic rays or man-made colliders that some serious physicists (from California, of course) began to propound holistic sorts of models in which no particle was more elementary than any other and any particle could be considered a composite of all the rest.
    In Cape Town in the summer of 1964, we heard popular lectures about the work of physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne’eman, both modern-day Mendeleyevs, who each invented their own periodic table of particles. Some of the subtables in their system contained eight distinct particles. Gell-Mann dubbed his model the Eightfold Way, a sophisticated and hip allusion to the eight Buddhist principles of living. By looking at the properties of the unpopulated gaps in their table, Gell-Mann and Ne’eman had predicted the observable properties of a very strange new particle called the Omega Minus. Shortly thereafter, exactly as forecast, the particle was created in a collision in the particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratories on Long Island. It was recognized by the characteristic trail it left in a giant bubble chamber, a signature whose properties matched the exact predictions of the Eightfold Way. It seemed you could apprehend the universe with thought.
    I became deeply attracted to particle physics and general relativity, subjects that dealt with the ultimate nature of matter, space and time; a life spent studying these topics would be a life devoted to the transcendental. Like many of my physics friends, I began to develop an almost religious passion for fundamental physics. But beneath my passion was an even greater desire for fame and immortality. I dreamed of being another Einstein. I wanted to spend my life focusing on the discovery of truths that would live forever. Sometimes, I felt arrogantly superior to people who were headed for more mundane professions.
    My mother encouraged me to devote myself to academic pursuits. My father, though he was more naturally scholarly than my mother, might nevertheless have been happier if I had gone into business with him. I